Client name withheld under NDA.
The company supplied fasteners, safety equipment and maintenance consumables to factories, shipyards and contractors. Almost all of its sales came from repeat accounts and word of mouth. The website was a product list with no way to request a quote. Sales had tried Google Ads on its own, but the campaign was sending clicks for products the company did not stock, and nobody was tracking which clicks became real conversations. Leads arrived by phone and email, and there was no record of where they had come from.
The sales director wanted a steady flow of new account enquiries without paying for browsers. In a business where an average first order can be worth thousands and a good customer stays for years, the quality of each lead matters far more than the number. We set a baseline, including a definition of a qualified lead that sales and marketing agreed on, and a single sheet where both teams could see the same numbers.
We sat with the sales team and defined a qualified lead: a named contact at a company that buys the products regularly, in an area the company serves, with a real need and budget. We set up call tracking, form tracking and a simple CRM pipeline so every enquiry was traced to its source.
B2B budgets disappear into clicks that never become customers. Agreeing the definition of a good lead first means every later decision can be judged against it.
We rebuilt the search campaigns around buying intent, such as supplier terms for specific product families, added a long list of negative keywords for retail and hobby searches, and sent traffic to dedicated pages with a quote form and a call button.
Industrial buyers search for exact product names and specifications. Targeting those terms, and excluding consumer searches, keeps the budget for people who actually order. Ads were also scheduled for working hours, since most buyers search from the office.
We rebuilt the product category pages with specifications, certifications and delivery coverage, and added a 'request a quote' form to every page. We wrote buyer guides on topics such as choosing safety footwear for worksites and published them to attract procurement searches.
Procurement staff compare suppliers on a spreadsheet. Pages that answer their questions early get a place on the shortlist. We also added downloadable product data sheets, which procurement teams save and forward.
We built a list of 300 target companies and ran LinkedIn campaigns aimed at purchasing managers, operations managers and site leads. Offers were practical, such as a free site consumables review, rather than a general brochure. Messages were short and written in the plain language of the shop floor.
Many B2B decision makers do not search for suppliers at all until a problem arises. LinkedIn puts the company in front of them before that moment.
We set up automatic follow-up emails for quote requests, a monthly review with the sales team on which leads closed, and reallocated budget toward the channels producing qualified conversations rather than raw volume.
The sales team's feedback was the most valuable data in the project. Marketing that does not hear which leads turned into orders optimises for the wrong thing. Our monthly call with the sales director lasted thirty minutes and changed the plan every time.
Seven months in, the company was getting more than double the qualified leads each month at a lower cost for each one, and a larger share came from bigger companies. Organic search began to carry a larger part of the load, which brings the cost down over time. Monthly organic sessions rose from 860 to 2,140 as the category pages and buyer guides gained visibility.
Lead definition, tracking, Google Ads rebuilt, quote-ready category pages launched.
Buyer guides published, LinkedIn campaigns running to target accounts, CRM pipeline in use.
Follow-up automation live, budget moved toward the best-converting channels, sales feedback loop in place.
Cost per qualified lead fell from S$420 to S$248 because the budget moved to searches and audiences that matched the buyers sales wanted. Cost per click was never the right measure.
Adding a quote form to every category page raised the website lead conversion rate from 1.2% to 2.9%. A buyer in a hurry will not search for a contact page. Put the form where the specification is, and keep it to four fields.
The share of leads from companies with 50 or more staff grew from 22% to 38% after sales told us which accounts closed. That feedback shaped targeting more than any dashboard did.
Tell us what you sell and who buys it. We will outline how we would find those buyers and how we would measure each lead.